About Adelard

Adelard of Bath

Adelard of Bath was a medieval
mathematician and natural philosopher, and a crucial figure
in the development of early European thought. Just as the
company Adelard seeks the widespread adoption of a better
notation for the description of computer software, so
Adelard of Bath was a major influence in the revolutionary
adoption of the Arabic notation for numbers instead of the
intractable Roman numerals.

He was a pioneer of the scientific
renaissance of the 12th century, when the learning of the
Ancient Greeks, which had been preserved by the Islamic
countries, was reintroduced into Europe along with ideas
from Arabic medicine, mathematics and astronomy. He studied
in Syria and Turkey, and returned to Europe an enthusiastic
promoter not only of Arabic knowledge but also the Arabic
tradition of rational scientific inquiry. The academic
establishment, lazing in idle reverence for the accepted
authorities of the day, suddenly had to face his wry
accusations of gullibility and his calls for experiment,
observation and innovation.

His writings include speculation that
animals must have souls because they possess the power of
judgement, and the first known account of the distillation
of alcohol. But his most influential works were on
mathematics. He translated Euclid's Elements - still
the basis of much of today's mathematics - from Arabic into
Latin, the international language of European scholarship.
He was also the author of a Latin version of a treatise on
Arabic arithmetic by al-Khwarizmi, the great Saracen
mathematician whose name, corrupted to algorism,
became the European word for the new system of numbers.

By the end of the 12th century the
academic world was divided between the algorists, followers
of al-Khwarizmi, and the abacists, who used the abacus as a
means of dealing with the unwieldy Roman notation. The
controversy raged for another century before, thanks to the
champions of progressive thought, the Arabic numerals
triumphed to become the system we use today.